In production of live or near-to-air programming captions are authored by transcriptionists (captioners) that listen to the program audio and enter text and formatting commands using some means of live text entry. These methods of low latency real time text entry include stenographic keyboards and specialized voice recognition software. When voice recognition methodologies are used the transcriptionist is generally required to re-speak the dialogue and descriptions of non-verbal sounds present in the program audio. As most captioners work from locations that are remote to the origination site of the live programming, it is necessary to provide a private audio feed to the captioner. This audio feed can be a telephone line or preferably a higher quality feed streamed via the Internet. A latency of 4 to 6 seconds in the display of caption text as related to the program audio is directly attributable to the time required by the captioner (transcriptionist) to interpret the audio and enter the appropriate caption text. This latency is present regardless of the particular method of data entry employed. This latency seriously degrades the usefulness of the captioning service. Additionally, since the closed caption data is 4 to 6 seconds delayed from the program video and audio in live programming, there has been no satisfactory way to splice program segments that are produced live, with post produced segments (e.g. commercials) that contain properly synchronized captions. In the case of such a splice either the last 4 to 6 seconds of the live captions must be discarded or the first 4 to 6 seconds of the commercial or other post produced content is dropped. Neither of these approaches is acceptable. What is needed is a new apparatus for live closed caption production that eliminates the inherent latency of live captions while preserving the correct timing of pre-authored upstream captions.